[ale] End of year digital clean up?

[Alex Carver]

On 2021-01-04 09:49, DJ-Pfulio via Ale wrote:
> I've had my list of new-year digital cleanup tasks for
> about a decade, but it can always be improved.
> 
> What do you do every year to clean up your data, email, photos,
> documents, ebooks, backups, retired credentials?
> 
> How do you find these things later?

At the moment nearly all of my financial documents are paper.  The 
current calendar year sits in a small filing box near my desk while all 
the rest go to filing crates.  I have started the process of switching 
to all electronic documents because mail theft has been up in my 
neighborhood.  I don't normally discard these so I have many file boxes 
going back over 20 years.

Email, Pictures and other digital data get backed up to multiple drives 
on a manual basis.  Especially when I swap hard drives around to add 
larger replacements for extra capacity.

Configuration files (basically all of /etc and /home and /var/spool on 
the mail server) on smaller machines get backed up with rdiff-backup 
nightly.


Finding everything is relatively easy, the files are categorized in 
directories and emails get filed by source (e.g. Bank A, Bank B, etc.) 
and the year.

The goals for this year are to get set up with long-duration archival 
media (mineral-based DVDs rather than organic dye), work on a NAS as a 
central backup, possibly also get a tape drive again to put on the NAS. 
  If I get the archival media process working I may get a scanner with a 
document feeder and scan my old financial documents to PDF for 
archiving.  Then I can shred the paper and reclaim some square footage. :)